How about a graphic on who’s NOT running?

Anyway, I thought y’all might be interested in seeing the interactive graphicThe New York Times has published showing the Democrats, or sort-of Democrats, who are definitely or maybe or possibly running for president next year.

(And no, the image above is not interactive. It’s just a screenshot from my iPad, although it links to the real one. The interactive one is here.)

Apparently, there’s a heap of hubris out there. All sorts of folks think they’re qualified to be POTUS, many of them on the thinnest possible grounds.

Personally, I’ve decided we need a good rule of thumb for winnowing the field, and I have gone ahead and come up with one, The country can thank me later. Here it is: No one younger than I am should be allowed to be president. Sure, that young fella Obama did pretty well, but we just can’t take chances with our country. Too much is at stake.

So, let’s see… the following youngsters are disqualified among those who are running or are likely: Booker, Buttigieg, Castro, Delaney, Gabbard, Gillibrand, Harris, Klobuchar, Yang, Bullock, Landrieu, McAuliffe, Merkley, O’Rourke.

I’ll figure out how to disqualify Sanders and Warren later. Hey, I didn’t claim my system was perfect. It’s just a starting point. I’ll continue to work on it until achieves my desired purpose of eliminating everyone other than Joe Biden.

(And no, Trump’s being older than I am doesn’t qualify him, since mentally and emotionally he’s about 3 years old.)

Warren is the only one I would absolutely hate to see instead of Trump. For someone who is supposed to be smart enough to be a college professor, she is INCREDIBLY stupid on economics. Now she wants to use a yearly “wealth tax” to pay for everyone to have childcare. Both sides of that equation are filled with unintended consequences.

I have donated to the Gabbard campaign. Will likely donate to Sanders and anyone else who comes out strongly against our military policies… Gabbard and Buttigieg have both served on the front lines and are opposed to our presence in many places.

Normally, I’d think anybody that young whose claim to fame — or in his case, lack of fame — is being mayor of South Bend to be kind of nuts saying he’s running for president.

So I was struck by how sensible he sounded.

I’m always impressed by a candidate who sounds intelligent. Because we don’t get that very often. It’s the way I was first impressed by Obama. I heard him on the radio giving a speech and didn’t know who it was because I missed the beginning, and I thought, “That guy’s impressive…”

Here’s a bit from a Nw Yorker profile that should send him to your “Will Not Vote For Him” bucket:

Climate policy, he said, was the deepest example of the imbalance, but the Iraq War was perhaps the most tangible. “There’s this romantic idea that’s built up around war,” he said. “But the pragmatic view is there are tons of people of my generation who have lost their lives, lost their marriages, or lost their health as a consequence of being sent to wars which could have been avoided.” Then he quoted, happily, from “Lawrence of Arabia”: “The virtues of war are the virtues of young men—courage and hope for the future. The vices of peace are the vices of old men—mistrust and caution.”

And sadly, he’s mistaken with the “tons of people of my generation” comment. Perhaps among his acquaintances, since he’s a veteran. But too few Americans today have a personal connection to military service…

Actually, she may be one of the handful who should be seriously considered. As you’ll recall, George Will thought so. And I liked what he said, that she’s “liberal enough to soothe other liberals without annoying everyone else.” Which puts her more or less in my comfort zone, at least theoretically, since I’m among those likely to be annoyed.

Also, she’s made presidential lists as long ago as 2012. Which means that for a respectable period of time, she’s been taken seriously by serious people. Seriously…

You better start looking for an alternative.. because Joe won’t make it out of the primary if he runs. He can’t run unless he is 100% sure he wins or else he ends up with a severely damaged legacy. A three time loser puts him closer to Lyndon Larouche level.

Let’s see – he couldn’t beat Dukakis and Gephardt – two of the lamest, dullest politicians ever. Couldn’t poll above single digits nationally against Obama and Hillary… In what way is he a better candidate in 2020 at age 78? Oh, he’s old. I get it.

Nah, I’ve liked Joe even back when he was only a little bit old. If he’d stayed in the 2008 contest, I’d have pushed to endorse him in the primary instead of Obama.

I don’t think he was fully on my radar screen back in ’88, but I probably would have liked him then, too. Then, he was just the guy who supposedly plagiarized Neil Kinnock. And that did him in.

By the early part of this century, I was more familiar with him, and was interested in him as presidential fodder well before 2008. That’s why I asked Fritz Hollings to see it he could get Joe to drop by when he was in town one time… this was maybe 2005 or earlier.

Joe came by on Friday afternoon, our busiest day of the week — usually an intense 10 hour day or more, without interruptions. He didn’t have to be anywhere until that night, so he sat and talked a couple of hours.

But even though I was in a panic to get back to putting out the pages, I enjoyed the visit, the first of several…

In the group, there are a few who, beyond lip service, belong in the first circle of my venn diagram of the things we need. My first priority is building a sense of community, sacrifice for the greater good, and admitting that we need to become better citizens and people, not some generic, nebulus “change.”
Buttiegieg goes farthest in backing-up his exhortation with specifics, and avoiding simplistic sound bites. I think he’s too untested and unseasoned to go far or to handle the job – yet. Booker has a good track record of working for those goals, but sometimes seems to grandstand into trouble, but is willing to back up and reset with a conciliatory tone. Biden lives the effort, but has a weakness for over-explaining and inundating people with anecdote aimed at building common ground but yielding weariness.
Warren, Harris, and too often, Sanders just have a way of coming across too strident. Castro has some good resume, but I don’t think defines his message in any memorable ways. I think Gillibrand is a lightweight, though moderate enough on some issues to attract some support. O’Rourke is just a celebrity with a lot of dynamism and some good positions
The ones I don’t want are the so-called “centrists” who are “liberal” on social issues, but owned by the right-wing on economics despite their declared allegiance to the middle class. I want nuance and deep, evidence-based thought on all issues whether it’s abortion, gay rights, taxation, macro-economics, fiscal and financial policy, or social safety-net.
Biden is still my first choice, Booker second, with Butti deserving to be heard.

Thanks for that analysis, Harry! I appreciate the thought that went into it. You’ve spent more time on it than I have.

I’ve got this aversion to paying attention to these folks. I think it’s a lingering effect of the campaign. I got so sick of the reporters getting excited about 2020 candidates coming to SC that they could hardly find time to cover OUR campaign, that it’s left a bad taste.

Biden is currently polling well against his Dem opponents. That has a lot to do with name recognition. He also easily beats Trump. Needless to say these early polls mean virtually nothing. I think Biden will fall behind once his past catches up with him. Do we really need a candidate who voted in favor of the Iraq war? Of course there is much good to commend Biden along with his shortcomings. There is much positive to say about all the candidates so I’ll watch closely and remain non comittal for now. Plenty of time to sort through it all. But I will, 100% vote for the Democrat come 11-2020. That’s true even if Trump is not the GOP nominee for whatever reason.

The fact that he is a political lifer — elected Ohio’s secretary of state in 1982 at 29, he then served seven terms in Congress — seems less like a defect than a credential now that the nation is two years into its experiment with treating the presidency as an entry-level public office. …

Fighting in Afghanistan was probably the right move. Iraq was not only not justified, but was ill-considered, disastrous in outcome, and not legally supported even if the phony reasons given had been true. We’ll be paying for it for decades if not longer (taking the national debt into consideration).
When someone says “populist” I usually wait to hear what in heck they mean and seldom get an answer. I think it’s an over-used, sloppily defined equivocation that is easily used to mislead like most labels.

What bothers me most about the populist label is its application by newspeople and pundits to a person like President Trump because they are too afraid or lazy to call demagoguery by its name and label it populism. While the roots (one latin, one greek) are closely related, the more descriptive name for the campaigning tool Trump used so well better describes two key characteristics of its use in his campaign. His demagoguery was highly deceptive, playing to fears and prejudices, magnifying and exacerbating them, while distracting from the real effect of his policies (eg tax policy) that benefit mostly those in higher financial strata. Add to that feigned religiosity by a man who never darkened a church door, shows vast ignorance of even basic tenets of faith (beyond rehearsed talking points), and a personal moral life and demeanor that requires selling one’s soul (in my view) to overlook. How did Romney put it? “A fraud and a huckster.”

I thought of him at the time as a “sheep in wolf’s clothing.” He was a moderately conservative pragmatist who called himself “severely conservative” and surged strongly to the right during the primary, but pivoted somewhat back toward his track record of moderation during the general election. My first thought at reading your question was “sacrificial lamb,” but that was just a comic knee-jerk. He suffered from the handling of the right-wing machine that was steering the Republican party and election campaigns at the time, but I don’t think he sold out his core beliefs, just subjuggated them.
I believe he might have been offered a cabinet post in Obama’s second term and would have served well if he hadn’t won the nomination.

Huh??? The absolutely correct vote against the worst policy decision in at least 50 years is a negative?? I’m going to just assume you’re yanking my chain. Then again people still defend that very well proven mistake. It’s why I initially supported Bernie in 16. It’s also why Biden is in my second tier. Everyone makes mistakes in life. But that vote showed a very serious lack of good judgement.

Yeah, I’m kinda yanking your chain. As I’ve said a lot of times, I don’t hold it against people if they were against Iraq to begin with. You should like this guy. But don’t hold it against Joe. Pretty much everybody voted yes on that. Brown is very unusual.

I appreciate people who were opposed to the Iraq “war” in the beginning and I have even greater admiration for those who have served there and in Afghanistan (i.e. not desk bound neocons) who are now opposed to us continuing terrible military policies. Any candidate who supports our “war” efforts is an automatic no for me. Gabbard has it right – if we want to implement liberal policies like single payer healthcare, “free” college, etc. it has to start with cutting military spending not just “taxing the rich”. There’s hundreds of billions available to transfer from war to peace.

No, I think I was probably being a bit of a policy snob. I was saying, “Pretty much everyone who’s anyone (which is to say, people who want to be taken seriously on security issues in the future, such as people who want to be president) voted for it.”